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Brands spent a lot of time and money in 2010 acquiring a social
following. By building up Facebook Likes and Twitter followers,
big brands like
The New York Times and Mountain Dew now have a social
audience pool that they can engage with.

The problem is that while some big brands have put a substantial
effort into the social wave, other big brands, as well as smaller
brands, are limited in their high volume approach to social
media.

Additionally, the bigger brands that have already made efforts
toward social follower acquisition have a
tough time tracking the ROI from theirefforts. However,
converging social media with display advertising can fix these
social media problems, as well as the everlasting problem of
banner ad blindness.

The wide reach of display advertising

Since the early days of the consumer Web, businesses have been
serving their display ads on publisher sites with the goal of
attracting new customers. Advertisers would back campaigns out to
actual sales dollars generated directly from the ad, allowing the
ROI to be measured appropriately.

E-mail marketing and SEM campaigns are tracked similarly, giving
advertisers the ability to figure out how much money they need to
spend on each channel to achieve a positive ROI. However, while
e-mail marketing generally only targets a subscriber list, and
SEM inventory mainly relies on search engines, display
advertising gives advertisers the ability to target new customers
and segmented audiences on the millions of Websites they visit.

This allows the brand to win additional sales from almost
anywhere on the Web. But the problem with display ads is that
they’re often ignored and go unnoticed by consumers, as display
ads are usually,though not always,salesy and not engaging.

The engagement power of social media

Social media, however, is not ignored. Like and retweet buttons
are easily and often clicked, and allow people to share brand
content to their own social audience. A brand that taps into
someone’s social graph can lead to dozens, even hundreds of an
individual’s friends and followers to check out the brand as
well.

A brand’s followers and like-ers can start receiving additional
social notices from a brand, allowing audiences to engage with
and share the brand’s latest deals or info about its newest
products. However, this is generally seen of as an exercise in
branding, adding an implicit value to brand, which is hard to
track.

While advertisers know they are getting some sort of long term
value, they don’t know exactly what this value is.
Additionally, social share buttons are generally limited to
internet real estate that the brand already owns, giving
advertisers a tough time to socially connect with audiences that
have interest in the brand, but have yet to check out their
latest blog post, viral video, or campaign.

Convergence

As a marketer, imagine spreading your brand’s Facebook Like
button to the sites that your audience visits. Imagine
being able to stay in front of your audience with your Twitter
feed and retweet buttons, or having ads that click-through to
share your content on Linkedin.

Converging social media with display advertising lets the two
forms of media synergize, and possibly become the most powerful
form of internet advertising available. We’ve already seen a
media convergence between display and search – the result of
which can be seen in Google Adwords – which has combined the
contextual targeting of their SEM platform with the inventory of
their display platform.

By converging social media with traditional display buying,
advertisers can build their social following and engage with
their audience on millions of Websites. Big brands like Ford
are already doing this, but 2011 will allow smaller brands to
socially activate their audience through display ads as well, the
benefits of which include:

An Unparalleled Reach – Not only do you get the
inventory reach with the rising popularity of real-time bidding
that new display media offers, people who engage with these ads
will further share this engagement with their social-graph.
This is the biggest possible reach for advertisers.

Increased Brand Engagement – As previously
stated, banner ads often go unnoticed or ignored. This is
mostly due to creative design – static banners tend to not jump
out to consumers, while animated banners tend to move too fast,
causing its messaging to be lost. By placing your brand’s
social plugins into ad creatives, audience engagement increases,
and their own social feed will remind them about your brand and
content, as well as spread it to their own social connections.

Lifetime Trackability – With the newly
democratized availability of audience targeting techniques,
specifically retargeting, advertisers can now
better track the total interaction between their brand and its
social audience. By segmenting your brand’s social
audience, retargeting allows you to track the total amount of
dollars spent by your socially acquired customers over any amount
of time! In some specific examples, the Facebook fans of one
particular college are 233% more active with the college’s online
marketing media than its Website’s general visitors, while the
Facebook fans of an up-and-coming house DJ were 367% more active
with the artist’s promotional ads when compared to the visitors
of his official Myspace page and fan blog.

By combining social media with display buying, small and big
advertisers alike are able to attract social followers from more
places than ever, and are finally able to track the results and
valuate their efforts. While both mediums have their own
unique strengths and weaknesses, converging the two will create
value that can’t be matched by each medium acting alone.